President Mary McAleese said during her visit to Butte that Ireland must show pity and compassion to refugees and she expressed the hope that the hunger strike by Afghan asylum seekers at St Patrick's Cathedral, Dublin, could be resolved in a "humanly decent" way.
"We have systems in place and these are systems which I'm sure, from time to time, make decisions that are heartbreaking, probably every day of the week. Every one of these stories has a very human, tragic component to it. Nonetheless, all of us are better off if we have a system that is fair, that is just and that is both accessible and is visible, that is transparent," she said.
She welcomed President Bush's intervention in America's immigration debate as a hopeful sign for thousands of undocumented Irish immigrants.
Mrs McAleese said she was encouraged by the positive response from the Government and from Senator Edward Kennedy to Mr Bush's televised speech calling for comprehensive immigration reform.
"I think the seeds of hope are there that the Irish undocumented, who are a tiny fraction of the undocumented in the United States . . . that their very complex, difficult situation will be resolved, hopefully in the medium term. It's very good to see it so high on President Bush's agenda," she said.
Mrs McAleese received an enthusiastic welcome in Butte, a copper mining town settled in the 19th century by Irish-speaking immigrants from the Beara Peninsula in west Cork.
Tricolours flew from rusting galley-masts above disused mine shafts, shamrocks decorated every lamp-post on the main street and up to a fifth of the town's 35,000 inhabitants were expected to attend an address by the President last night.
Mrs McAleese said that, although many of today's illegal Irish immigrants came to America for reasons other than economic need, a number of the undocumented left Ireland in the 1980s and have made their homes in the US.
"The numbers . . . are relatively modest but they are people for whom we would have a lot of pity and compassion because they are people who have made their homes here and have made their contribution economically here and whose children are growing up as Americans," Mrs McAleese said.
During a visit to Butte's municipal archive, Mrs McAleese saw a letter Éamon de Valera wrote to supporters in the town a week after the Easter Rising.
She said this year's 1916 commemoration in Dublin had been a "turning point" for Irish society and she expressed satisfaction at the national debate triggered by her speech on the Rising at University College Cork.
